The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.
Monday, May 31
Daily News Stuff 31 May 2021
Anime of the day is Trigun, a 26 episode TV series from 1998 that sadly has spawned no sequels shut up the movie doesn't exist.
The series follows the story of two claims adjusters, "Derringer" Meryl Stryfe and "Stungun" Milly Thompson, who are out to stop the depredations of Vash the Stampede before he bankrupts the insurance company they work for. I wonder how they would have dealt with Kei and Yuri.
Tech News
Yeah, I need to clean out my PCs. I got a couple of cans of compressed air but haven't had the time to actually apply them. 110C does seem a little excessive.
Blockchain Imposition Edition
Top Story
- Blockchain mining has made it impossible to buy video cards for video, so what if they instead used hard drives?
Yep, storage market is fucked. (New Scientist)
Drives haven't disappeared, but bargains on large hard drives that were commonplace six months ago are gone, and supply is patchy generally.
I got myself a new 6TB drive (Toshiba Gold) last month to replace a failing unit in my NAS, because I knew this was coming. That drive is still available - but I'd now have to order it in from Amazon UK, because there's zero stock in Australia, even at double the price I paid.
The people behind Chia say that this will be a good thing in the long run as drive makers ramp up production, to which I counter, fuck you you fucking fucks.
The series follows the story of two claims adjusters, "Derringer" Meryl Stryfe and "Stungun" Milly Thompson, who are out to stop the depredations of Vash the Stampede before he bankrupts the insurance company they work for. I wonder how they would have dealt with Kei and Yuri.
Tech News
- Apparently it's Computex or something, and Intel has announced a refresh of their Tiger Lake laptop parts. (AnandTech)
You can tell how far they've come by the fact that these are 15W parts but they quote performance numbers for them running at 28W and they actually use up to 50W: Not very.
- The next version of Windows 10 is on its way, and will bring sweeping UI changes that will probably suck. (Bleeping Computer)
Or you could not do that, Microsoft. Just a thought.
- Despite booking $11 billion in orders, Aerion could not raise funds to complete its supersonic business jet. (Flying)
They will now return to making expensive chairs.
- Apple's next-gen M1X Mac mini will return the features removed from the M1 Mac mini. (9to5Mac)
Not upgradeable RAM, though. Not upgradeable anything, in fact.
Something Worse Than a Four-Year-Old RX 580 Full of Dust Video of the Day
Yeah, I need to clean out my PCs. I got a couple of cans of compressed air but haven't had the time to actually apply them. 110C does seem a little excessive.
Substitute Anime Music Video of the Day
Ah, says Pixy, I'll include that AMV, because while Konosuba might be trash that's a problem with the story and not the artwork, and I can introduce more readers to Saint Motel.
Nope, says YouTube. Age Restricted for Anime Boobs.
Well, instead, here's The World God Only Knows.
And Saint Motel's original video for My Type.
Disclaimer: You've got a pulse and you are breathing, mostly.
Nope, says YouTube. Age Restricted for Anime Boobs.
Well, instead, here's The World God Only Knows.
And Saint Motel's original video for My Type.
Disclaimer: You've got a pulse and you are breathing, mostly.
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HoloEN Is Having A Day
Ina just hit 1 million subscribers a couple of days ago, Gura just hit 2.75 million, Kiara scheduled a 12-hour marathon stream to take her to 1 million - and hit the mark three hours early while she was still asleep.
And then we got this:
Amelia, Gura, and Ina played Mario Party with a side bet that the winner could post anything they wanted on the others' Twitter accounts.
Ina just hit 1 million subscribers a couple of days ago, Gura just hit 2.75 million, Kiara scheduled a 12-hour marathon stream to take her to 1 million - and hit the mark three hours early while she was still asleep.
And then we got this:
Amelia, Gura, and Ina played Mario Party with a side bet that the winner could post anything they wanted on the others' Twitter accounts.
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Sunday, May 30
Daily News Stuff 30 May 2021
10nm Sneak Attack Edition
Anime of the day is Irresponsible Captain Tylor from 1993. There's 26 TV episodes, followed by a 10 episode OVA series that ran from 1994 to 1996 and wait, where did that come from? A 12-episode sequel called Irresponsible Galaxy Tylor from 2017.
Update: No wonder I missed the "sequel"; it sank without trace. It gets a 4 on My Anime List, and tetanus would probably get at least a 5.
Justy Ueki Tylor is either a supernaturally lucky idiot or a tactical genius, or a little of both. He joins the Space Force to work a cushy job in the pension department, but finds himself on the frontline just as a major war breaks out.
This is one I would recommend to fans of Dirty Pair; it leans a little more into the comedy but it features people good at their jobs being allowed to do their jobs, and the anime itself is clearly a labour of love.
Today's entry makes Dell look good. The Dell system was competently engineered and assembled, it's just that everything was designed to reduce cost rather than to make the system run smoothly.
This system from iBUYPOWER was delivered untested and physically broken.
Looks at first glance like cheap knockoff rubbish but it's actually a competently-built product that performs exactly as it should.
10nm Sneak Attack Edition
Top Stories
- Intel has quietly slipped Tiger Lake B into the sales channel - so quietly that I missed the importance of this yesterday. (WCCFTech)
Existing 11th generation Intel desktop CPUs are made on their old 14nm process; until now only laptop chips were produced at 10nm. Tiger Lake B represents Intel's first 10nm desktop parts.
We'll have to wait for reviews to see exactly how this turns out, but the new 11900KB uses 65W at base load, compared to 125W for the 14nm 11900K. It also looks like they've increased the cache from 16MB to 24MB.
On the other hand, base clocks for the 11900B are a little slower than before.
The 11500B on the third hand looks like it could be a gem: The power remains the same at 65W, but base clocks are up from 2.7GHz to 3.3GHz, and maximum boost clock from 4.6GHz to 5.3GHz.
- Intel also has graphics cards on the way. (Tom's Hardware)
This is great given the ongoing shortage and sky-high prices from both Nivida and AMD. The cards are expected to have up to 512 Xe execution units, which gives us a good idea how fast they will be, because Tiger Lake laptop chips have up to 96 Xe units. The dedicated cards will likely run at a faster clock.
On the downside, we won't see these until next year, so in the meantime it's either wait or pay the scalper.
Update: No wonder I missed the "sequel"; it sank without trace. It gets a 4 on My Anime List, and tetanus would probably get at least a 5.
Justy Ueki Tylor is either a supernaturally lucky idiot or a tactical genius, or a little of both. He joins the Space Force to work a cushy job in the pension department, but finds himself on the frontline just as a major war breaks out.
This is one I would recommend to fans of Dirty Pair; it leans a little more into the comedy but it features people good at their jobs being allowed to do their jobs, and the anime itself is clearly a labour of love.
Tech News
- Zen 3 Threadrippers could arrive in August. (WCCFTech)
That's ten months after the launch of Zen 3 for the consumer desktop, though it's only recently that the high-end Zen 3 parts (12 and 16 cores) became readily available.
- Microsoft Edge 91 is here and it's, um, basically crap. (Bleeping Computer)
It pushes a bunch of unwanted features and an even bigger bunch of bugs.
Avoid. Oh, wait, you can't. It updates itself auotomatically.
- Iran has banned Bitcoin mining due to ongoing blackouts. (NBC)
This is not entirely because the country is run by genocidal kleptocrats; they've also been subject to a prolonged drought that has reduced hydroelectric output.
The government blamed the blackouts on a natural gas shortage, which is rather like Australia blaming problems on a mouse shortage. (CNN)
Irresponsible Anime Music Video of the Day
It Fell Off the Back of a Truck Video of the Day
Today's entry makes Dell look good. The Dell system was competently engineered and assembled, it's just that everything was designed to reduce cost rather than to make the system run smoothly.
This system from iBUYPOWER was delivered untested and physically broken.
Bonus Not Actually Junk Video of the Day
Looks at first glance like cheap knockoff rubbish but it's actually a competently-built product that performs exactly as it should.
Disclaimer: We found the missing one - it was in the dust filter! Just like this blog post!
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Saturday, May 29
Daily News Stuff 29 May 2021
Pessimisations Abound Edition
Anime of the day is Ranma ½, Rumiko Takahashi's third and probably still biggest hit series. It ran for 161 episodes from 1989 to 1992 and as usual still didn't cover all the story (which ran to 38 volumes of manga).
The story? Well, that cute redhead in the opening credits? His name's Ranma. He's under a curse that many teenage boys would pay money for, and searching desperately for a cure. As these things usually go, most of the cast of the show also ends up cursed.
It does get a little repetitive after a while. Actually, it gets a lot repetitive after a while. It's worth watching some of it as long as you don't feel obliged to watch all the way to the end because there isn't one.
Update: Swapped out the nice creditless version for one that will play in the US.
This is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children, and those are the girls who sang it. Keen-eyed observers will be wondering if that is, and the answer is yes. It's a very young Suzuka Nakamoto, from even before she became the lead singer for Babymetal.
The connection doesn't stop there; the other two members of Babymetal first caught attention in a talent contest performing a dance routine to the song Over the Future.... Which is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children.
Pessimisations Abound Edition
Top Stories
- When our main datacenter burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - which is several weeks ago now - I had to bring up other sites on the mee.nu server and I made some hacks to limit performance-crunching features.
I haven't had time to undo those hacks yet because we also had servers at that datacenter for my day job and the following weeks were somewhat.... Fraught.
Anyway, I'll be working to undo those de-featurings this weekend.
- It's time to firewall your firewalls to defend your defenses from attacking attackers.
Just before a report was released about Chinese hackers compromising Pulse Secure VPN appliances, the hacks were quietly removed. (The Record)
FireEye, the company monitoring this, has revised its report from "a group likely connected with Chinese espionage did this" to "China did this".
- The Russia-based hackers who compromised the SolarWinds management software are targeting the governments of 24 countries. (Bleeping Computer)
Again, this is not a rogue criminal organisation operating in Russia. This is the Russian government.
- If you have SonicWall security appliances, patch that shit now. (Bleeping Computer)
It never ends.
If you don't want to sleep for a week, go over to Bleeping Computer and start scrolling.
Anime of the day is Azumanga Daioh.... Wait, no, it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is that version, but no.
Anime of the day is Zettai Karen Children... Wait, no it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is the live version... I'll include that at the bottom of the post, because if nothing else it has some historical significance.
Anime of the day is Nanaka 6/17... Well, crap.
Anime of the day is Zettai Karen Children... Wait, no it's not. I can't find a clean version of the opening credits. There is the live version... I'll include that at the bottom of the post, because if nothing else it has some historical significance.
Anime of the day is Nanaka 6/17... Well, crap.
Uh...
The story? Well, that cute redhead in the opening credits? His name's Ranma. He's under a curse that many teenage boys would pay money for, and searching desperately for a cure. As these things usually go, most of the cast of the show also ends up cursed.
It does get a little repetitive after a while. Actually, it gets a lot repetitive after a while. It's worth watching some of it as long as you don't feel obliged to watch all the way to the end because there isn't one.
Update: Swapped out the nice creditless version for one that will play in the US.
Tech News
- Back in the Paleolithic Era I had a YouTube channel. It will come as a surprise to many of you that it was a curated collection of anime openings and endings. No full episodes, no full songs, just the opening and ending credits.
Then the first version of ContentID got switched on, and I got three strikes instantly because the music in some of those clips matched their database, and it was gone forever.*
That was more than a decade ago, but proving that a trillion dollars in market cap doesn't mean you have the faintest clue about anything Twitch is replicating YouTube's fuckup in every last detail. (The Verge)
Nice Twitch channel you have here. Shame if anything were to happen to it. Like, for example, Twitch happened.
* I still have all the video files and if you search very carefully you might still find them, but the YouTube channel got yeeted to Yeetsville.
- USB power delivery is getting amped up to 240W. (AnandTech)
Well, that's technically the exact opposite of what's happening. Standard USB-C cables can deliver up to 60W - 20V and 3A. Specifically rated cables can deliver 100W - 20V and 5A. The new standard keeps the same current rating but increases the voltage to 48V.
That's only for 5A rated cables and you'll need a new cable anyway, with capacitors rated at 60V+ for safety.
This can replace power bricks for even most high-end laptops - and smaller all-in-one desktops as well - with a single standard port. The power bricks won't necessarily be smaller, but the same power brick will work for any device unless the manufacturers explicitly cripple them so that is almost certainly what will happen.
The new standard also supports stepping the voltage up in 100mV increments, so you can expect chargers that support all of that to cost a bit more than the typical cheap phone charger from Kmart.
- I came looking for weed, and found Ethereum. (Tom's Hardware)
British police took a break from confiscating butter knives to check out a suspected pot farm using an illegal electricity tap. They confirmed the location using an infrared-sensing drone, which is a common way to spot these sites because their grow lamps put out a lot of heat.
But so do 100 specialised mining rigs stuffed full of Nvidia graphics cards, which is what was actually found.
- Sabrent's 2TB Plotripper Pro has a 54PBW rating. (Tom's Hardware)
To unpack that a little, this is a 2TB NVMe SSD, one of those little M.2 drives that plugs into a slot on newer motherboards. It can write a total of 54PB - 54,000TB - over its lifespan.
Assuming a 5 year warranty, that's 30TB per day - 15 times the drive's capacity, which is termed as 15 DWPD (drive writes per day).
That is the highest rating I have ever seen on a general-purpose SSD. Expensive enterprise drives go as high as 10 DWPD.
This is - of course - for crypto mining with Chia.
- Nvidia's RTX 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM. (WCCFTech)
People complained when the 3090 was launched because the MSRP of $1500 was considered excessive. Compared to what it costs to get one of those cards now, that seems laughably low.
- Twitter has confirmed their paid plan, Twitter Blue.
For $2.99 per month you get absolutely nothing.
There is one feature Twitter could offer that would be worth paying for - it rhymes with edit button - but they absolutely refuse because they know that their users are batshit insane and it would be an unimaginable clusterfuck.
- What's new in Swift 5.5? (Hacking with Swift)
Swift is Apple's programming language to replace Objective C, which absolutely nobody liked. There was a lot of buzz around it early on as a new systems programming language with a clean and thoughtful design, but then people tried using it and the buzz died.
There are third-party compilers and you can write apps in Swift and run them anywhere including Android, but nobody wants to.
- If you have a last-generation iPad Pro with 6GB of RAM, a single app can use at most 4.5GB of that, leaving 25% of the RAM for the operating system and other apps.
If you have a new 16GB iPad Pro your apps can now get 5GB of RAM - a whole extra 512MB. (MacRumors)
iPads are a good device for artists, with their high resolution screens and stylus support. Why plug an expensive drawing tablet into an expensive PC when you can just get an iPad?
Well, this is why. Because Apple hates you.
Karen Girls Music Video of the Day
This is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children, and those are the girls who sang it. Keen-eyed observers will be wondering if that is, and the answer is yes. It's a very young Suzuka Nakamoto, from even before she became the lead singer for Babymetal.
Babymetal Music Video of the Day
The connection doesn't stop there; the other two members of Babymetal first caught attention in a talent contest performing a dance routine to the song Over the Future.... Which is the theme song for Zettai Karen Children.
Disclaimer: See you in the mosh'sh pit.
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Friday, May 28
Daily News Stuff 28 May 2021
Oh Great Edition
Anime of the day is Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi from 2002, which tells the classic story of legendary Heian Era onmyoji Abe no Seimei, only with a very slightly different take to what is found in Japanese high school literature class.
The song is by Megumi Hayashibara, but I don't think she had a character role , certainly not a starring one.
As I said, a slightly different take to what you'd learn in literature class.
It's worth noting that a major character in the story is called Mune-Mune, which translates as, well, boobs - and you can probably spot who that is in this clip. But Mune was in fact a real person who features in the story of the historical Abe no Seimei.
Because Japan.
Oh Great Edition
Top Story
- Intel's next-generation Alder Lake is expected to arrive this year - and probably with a whimper. (Tom's Hardware)
Intel have been talking up its single-core performance, but they need to, because it looks like the low power laptop parts - 15W - will have two cores. Well two large cores - the type of core you normally find on laptops - and also eight small cores, like a smart phone.
AMD can provide eight large cores at a 15W TDP.
So Intel not only needs to deliver a really fast large core, because they'll only have two of them, and a really fast small core, because they'll only have two large cores, they need to deliver the really fast large cores and the really fast small cores working together seamlessly at a low power consumption and that just plain ain't on the cards..
It looks like it could be even more power-hungry than Tiger Lake... It is Tiger Lake, right? When that is exactly the issue these small cores are supposed to address.
I do expect it to deliver on single-threaded workloads. And it will be arriving well before AMD's Zen 4, so it should have time to establish itself before it gets demolished in turn by the competition. Competition of this sort is a fine thing.
- Actually the thing that had me earlier muttering under my breath oh, great - I save my expletives for the written word, mere shrieks of anguish being too ephemeral to be a worthy medium - turned out to be pretty reasonable.
At my day job we're currently suffering from success. It's better than the alternative, but it's going to be hectic for the rest of the year. October in particular is going to be 31 days of crazy. The length and frequency of these posts might get a little glitchy around then.
The song is by Megumi Hayashibara, but I don't think she had a character role , certainly not a starring one.
Tech News
- Marvell has announced the first PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers. (AnandTech)
Intel's Alder Lake is expected to provide PCIe 5.0 - I don't remember if that has been officially announced as yet, or merely leaked - as is AMD's Zen 4 next year. But this controller is aimed at servers, not at desktops, let alone laptops. Power consumption for the controller chip alone is 9W, where an 8-core AMD APU - CPU and graphics combined - uses 15W.
PCIe 4.0 is already pretty power hungry; PCIe 5.0 isn't going to improve that. But it is fast; this controller will deliver up to 14GB per second.
- Speaking of Zen 4, here's Zen 5. (WCCFTech)
I'm not sure this even deserves being called a leak; it consists of a name - Granite Ridge - and a diagram so pixelated it could appear on a true crime show without any additional editing.
- How to get all your work done on an iPad. (ZDNet)
Step 1: Have very, very low expectations.
He lists email, a calendar, a password manager, and a text editor. He could get by with a Tandy Model 100.
- AI's core competence seems to be screwing things up faster and on a larger scale than mere humans can hope for. (Vox)
And we are very, very good at screwing up. The problem is we need to eat and sleep and stuff like that, so I'm told, so we take regular forced breaks from screwing up.
AI can screw things up 24x7.
Magical Shopping Arcade Anime Music Video of the Day
As I said, a slightly different take to what you'd learn in literature class.
It's worth noting that a major character in the story is called Mune-Mune, which translates as, well, boobs - and you can probably spot who that is in this clip. But Mune was in fact a real person who features in the story of the historical Abe no Seimei.
Because Japan.
Disclaimer: Actually, I'll stick with because Japan for now.
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Thursday, May 27
Daily News Stuff 27 May 2021
We Who Remain Edition
Anime of the day is Midori no Hibi from 2004, in which, um. Wikipedia, any help?
It's actually a really nice little show, despite the insane premise.
I've posted both of these before on my own blog, but possibly not since I got syndicated, so here you go.
Disclaimer: Putting the cation in syndication.
We Who Remain Edition
Top Stories
- So, after that extremely unplanned upgrade last night - which took forever even on an 8-core system with NVMe storage - my mouse had three broken legs. Basically it would get stuck about once a second, unfreeze, and immediately stick again.
But I know this one. This has happened before. And I blogged about it so that if it ever happened again, I'd know exactly where to look for the solution.
...
Oh, right. The solution to sudden mouse freezes after a Windows upgrade is to disable HDCP on your second monitor.
Really.
- Get your SSDs now before the price goes up. (Tom's Hardware)
Yep, you guessed it. Blockchain ruins everything.
Seiji Sawamura is the toughest student in his high school. His grades are not very good because he fights more than he studies, but he tends to protect the weaker students from bullies. A few classmates idolize him; one (Midori Kasugano from a different school) shyly loves him from afar; but most are just afraid of him, which has made it impossible for him to find a girlfriend. In desperation, he says to himself that he wants a girlfriend no matter who it is. He then notices a miniature Midori attached to where his right hand used to be.Thanks Wikipedia. Makes total sense.
It's actually a really nice little show, despite the insane premise.
Tech News
- Speaking of SSDs, the WD Black SN750 SE is one. (AnandTech)
Don't buy it. Probably. I got myself two WD Black SN750 drives in the Cyber Monday sales, but those are actually very different drives. The older model is a conventional high-end PCIe 3.0 drive; the newer one is a low-end PCIe 4.0 drive - it has no DRAM cache. And since its listed specs are only at PCIe 3.0 levels I don't really see the point.
It will probably do just fine for the average desktop - more than fine - but wouldn't be my first choice. Or even my tenth.
- Nvidia may be launching the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti on Monday. (Tom's Hardware)
Get those second mortgages ready!
It was easier when you simply couldn't get them at all.
- AMD is now the 11th largest semiconductor company in the world. (Tom's Hardware)
After increasing sales by 93% year-on-year.
Texas Instruments is number 9, with 27% annual growth, which is pretty good for a company founded in 1930.
- AMD's Strix Point APU could feature both Zen 5 and Zen 4 cores, RDNA 3 graphics, and a large L4 cache, all on TSMC's 3nm process. (WCCFTech)
Or, on the other hand, not. But an L4 cache for AMD's APUs will come sooner rather than later. Intel's already done it, after all.
- Freenode is imploding, and it's spectacular. (FossPost)
This is the 25-year-old IRC network that got taken over by corporate interests under questionable circumstances. Those corporate interests, it turns out, are completely fucking retarded.
I've said that socialism is the belief that the goose will continue to lay eggs after it's been served up as Christmas dinner, but that way of thinking is also common among a certain class of entrepeneur.
- Oracle is giving away free shit. (Serve the Home)
In this case, a 4 core Arm virtual server with 24GB of RAM.
I don't know what the catches are. They're there, I just don't know what they are yet.
- Amazon is buying MGM for $8 billion. (Thurrott.com)
Which will give them ownership of Stargate and a bunch of other stuff.
I'd mock this deal on general principle but the only Amazon show I've actually watched was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens and they didn't fuck it up. I fully expected them to fuck it up and they did not.
- If everyone is working from home the answer to maintaining corporate control is to make them live at work. (SF Chronicle)
Google's new motto: If you're gonna be evil, don't take any half measures.
Code eighteen hours and what do you get?
A mocha soy latte and five grand in debt.
- Russia is a safe haven for hackers, say key cybersecurity and counterintelligence officials and also everyone else with two functioning brain cells. (CNBC)
In my opinion, Darkside was operating with - at a minimum - the tacit approval of Russian authorities, if not under their direct control.
- Long working hours kill people. (The Seattle and/or New York Times)
As Buffy said, hey I've died twice.
Electroswing Anime Music Video of the Day
Show Tune Anime Music Video of the Day
I've posted both of these before on my own blog, but possibly not since I got syndicated, so here you go.
Disclaimer: Putting the cation in syndication.
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Wednesday, May 26
Daily News Stuff 26 May 2021
F-Word All The F-Words Edition
Anime of the day is Log Horizon from 2013. This is what is known as an isekai story - literally another world - and those have become something of a blight on anime and manga in recent years. But this is one of the better ones.
The plot is that everyone playing the latest update of a particular online game gets dumped into that world for real. Like... A hundred thousand people, all at once.
The difference between Log Horizon and most other isekais is that it actually examines what would happen if you took a small city's worth of people from our world and dumped them in a fantasy realm that they are used to treating as a game. And the results aren't always pretty.
F-Word All The F-Words Edition
Top Stories
- Dear Microsoft,
It's not fucking up to you how many fucking times I pause your fucking updates. Unlike you retards, I have a fucking job to do, so kindly take your updates, cover them in glitter glue, and shove them so far up your ass that you see stars when you close your eyes.
Love,
Pixy
Update: WINDOWS YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT DIE IN ALL THE FIRES.
- Arm has announced three new Arm cores. (AnandTech)
Which is kind of a logical thing for Arm to announce, and a logical thing to be announced by Arm.
Anyway, specifically we have the X2, following the high-performance X1, the A710, following the formerly high-performance A78, and the A510, following the power-efficient A55.
All three support the new Armv9 instruction set, and the X2 and A510 are 64-bit only designs. As a developer I'm generally against ripping out backwards-compatibility like that, but on the other hand the x86 architecture has maintained binary compatibility since 1978 and as a result is now insane.
Anyway, the X2 is 16% faster than the X1, assuming the same manufacturing process and power consumption. The A710 - no longer being the top performing core - delivers the same performance as the A78 but uses 30% less power. And the A510 is 25% slower than the A73, which was Arm's high-end core in 2017 - and what powers my "new" phone.
Not an astounding upgrade but still pretty solid.
The plot is that everyone playing the latest update of a particular online game gets dumped into that world for real. Like... A hundred thousand people, all at once.
The difference between Log Horizon and most other isekais is that it actually examines what would happen if you took a small city's worth of people from our world and dumped them in a fantasy realm that they are used to treating as a game. And the results aren't always pretty.
Tech News
- A million PCs are being sold per day, with an expected growth of 18% for 2021. (Tom's Hardware)
The article says that this is happening "despite" the component shortages, but that's backwards. This is a major factor causing the component shortages. PC sales have been trending slowly downwards for years and certainly no-one was stockpiling parts in the event of a surge.
- It may look like a Flavoradio from 1980 but it is actually an FPGA developer kit for vision-centric AI projects. (Serve the Home)
At $199 it's a little more expensive than an AM radio too, but that's a pretty good price for this kind of developer board.
- Chrome 91 includes a gravity sensor API. (Phoronix)
That will come in handy the next time I forget to pay the gravity bill.
- Mathematicians have figured out how to figure out the square root of one. (Quanta)
For rather complicated definitions of "square root" and "one". Specifically it solves Hilbert's 12th problem from 1900 for what are known as totally real fields.
Not in the way Hilbert envisioned, since mathematics has advanced somewhat in 121 years, but solved nonetheless.
- Russia has fined Google 6 million rubles - approximately twelve cents - for failing to remove what it calls "illegal content". (Engadget)
What Russia means here is content inconvenient to their narrative, the kind of stuff Big Tech kills with an axe if it inconveniences their own narrative.
- Amazon's ad revenue is now twice that of Snap, Twitter, Roku, and Pinterest combined, or approximately twelve cents. (CNBC)
I don't think any of those companies are exactly raking it in right now.
- I mentioned that Phison has a dumb name but makes good SSD controllers, but a 15 microsecond access time? Really? (Hot Hardware)
That seems awfully fast but the chart data is at least consistent.
And speaking of dumb names, one of their competitors is called InnoGrit. I guess eventually all the cool names are taken.
- I hadn't heard Subaru - the dancing duck girl from yesterday - sing before. Her voice drops by about an octave. Rather striking.
You Have to Admit That They Know How to Draw Food Anime Music Video of the Day
Disclaimer: ALL THE FIRES. ALL OF THEM.
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Tuesday, May 25
Daily News Stuff 25 May 2021
Possible Gainzzz Edition
Anime of the day is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the show that catapulted Kyoto Animation to fame. There is only one correct way to watch this series, and that is the scrambled order it was originally broadcast in, with the original messed-up next episode trailers.
That was a a stroke of genius, I think, converting a conventionally oddball show into a meta-oddball show where you were kept waiting for resolutions to reverse-cliffhangers - sure, we know how she escaped, but what was she doing on that cliff in the first place?
There's a second TV season from 2009 which I quite liked but which divided the fanbase with the infamous adaption of the Endless Eight story from the original novels. And, as usual, also a movie (quite good) and a canonical alternate universe spinoff called The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan (surprisingly good).
I don't like the song that much but the animation is great.
This - both of them - is Subaru from Hololive. If Pekora is Hololive's Bugs Bunny, Subaru is their Daffy Duck.
She has a an animation of her dancing with her duck alter ego in her end credits, and it's gone viral... The duck, that is.
Disclaimer: And sometimes a duck is just a duck.
Possible Gainzzz Edition
Top Story
- I think I've fixed the main page template over at Ace's site. The template code somehow got mangled and was including multiple copies of posts into that page, though the individual pages worked fine.
I still get a warning from Safari about the page, but it certainly loads faster. I think Safari is just not a very good browser in general.
- On the plus side, if you're on MacOS, Mozilla just fixed a 21 year old problem in Firefox. (Bugzilla)
Blake Ross
Well, I think that question got answered.
Comment 5 • 21 years ago
How easy/hard would this be?
That was a a stroke of genius, I think, converting a conventionally oddball show into a meta-oddball show where you were kept waiting for resolutions to reverse-cliffhangers - sure, we know how she escaped, but what was she doing on that cliff in the first place?
There's a second TV season from 2009 which I quite liked but which divided the fanbase with the infamous adaption of the Endless Eight story from the original novels. And, as usual, also a movie (quite good) and a canonical alternate universe spinoff called The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan (surprisingly good).
Tech News
- AMD's Ryzen 5600H laptop part beats Intel's 11400H. (Tom's Hardware)
By a tiny margin on single-threaded tasks, but a solid 28% on multi-threaded.
The 5600H uses the latest Zen 3 cores, which is great but also really fucking annoying because the 5600U... No, wait, the 5600U is also Zen 3? So the 5700U and 5500U are Zen 2. I don't know, whatever. Chips is chips.
These - the 5600H and 11400H - are 6-core parts for mid-range laptops, most likely to be found paired with something like an RTX 3060.
- No, I didn't get enough sleep last night, how did you guess?
- AMD's RDNA 3 and Nvidia's Lovelace family - both due next year - are expected to be more than twice as fast as the current cards that you can't get. (WCCFTech)
Actually, I just checked, and my usual supplier has not only the 6700XT and 6900XT in stock, but also a small number of RTX 3060, 3070, and 3080 cards. The prices for the Nvidia cards are astronomical (and the AMD cards stratospheric), but they have them.
- Qualcomm has announced a developer kit for Windows on Arm. (Thurrott.com)
Three years after they launched Windows on Arm, which raises the question of how the fuck they expected anything to be developed for it.
It will be powered by Snapdragon 7c compute platform, which is, well... You know that cheap phone I bought recently, which had a three-year-old SOC that didn't use the latest Arm core even when it was new? The Snapdragon 7c is slower than that.
- Apple is looking to remove the ability to boot from an external drive. (Apple Insider)
Apple seems intent on crippling third-party tools that can back up your boot volume, while their own backup utility often fails for no reason.
Also, if the internal drive on your new Arm-based Mac - which is soldered in place and encrypted by a chip that is also soldered in place - if that drive dies, you can't boot, even if you have a bootable backup. You're simply fucked.
- China is cracking down on crypto mining. (South China Morning Post)
Okay. Sure. You do that. Have fun.
Just Two Ducks Dancing Video of the Day
I don't like the song that much but the animation is great.
This - both of them - is Subaru from Hololive. If Pekora is Hololive's Bugs Bunny, Subaru is their Daffy Duck.
She has a an animation of her dancing with her duck alter ego in her end credits, and it's gone viral... The duck, that is.
Disclaimer: And sometimes a duck is just a duck.
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Monday, May 24
Daily News Stuff 24 May 2021
Every Week Is Shark Week In Shark Town Edition
Before Hololive I watched every single one of these. Well, more I played them on the third monitor while I worked to help mute the screams of the damned from next door. (I work from home and my neighbours have small children. About thirty of them it sometimes seems.)
Cyberpower. This one almost didn't suck.
I mentioned in the Dell video that there was a second part that went over the rest of the problems. Here it is.
Every Week Is Shark Week In Shark Town Edition
Top Story
- So apparently yesterday's AMV - Kevin Caldwell's classic Engel - doesn't play in the US. There's only one copy of it on YouTube that I can find so I can't even try to offer an alternative.
It is still available for download on AnimeMusicVideos.com. It's video number 230 on that site. The latest arrival is number 206,621.
- If Apple is the only organisation capable of defending our privacy, it's time to panic. (The Guardian)
Apple isn't protecting your private information, you obtuse womble. It's monopolising it.
But it is good to see the Big Tech companies fighting among themselves; it's when they all agree on something that you really know you're about to get screwed. Like legislation with bipartisan support, it is never about what is good for you.
Anime of the day is... No. Scrub that. You're not ready for that one.
Anime of the day is Maison Ikkoku, the one Rumiko Takahashi story that actually had an ending. The manga ran simultaneously with Urusei Yatsura - she must have been working night and day back then - and the 96 episode anime series kicked in one week to the day after the final TV episode of Urusei Yatsura.
(I just checked, and no, there was a gap of nearly a year before Ranma started airing.)
(I just checked, and no, there was a gap of nearly a year before Ranma started airing.)
Tech News
- The TI-84 Plus CE Python Graphing Calculator runs Python. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, Circuit Python to be precise, which is a version of MicroPython, which is not actually Python but looks a lot like one and is quite good at its job.
- Chia has written 186 exabytes of data to 10 exabytes of disk. (WCCFTech)
That's a lot.
- That page, by the way, had an ad for the HP Omen 15 (at least for me). It's currently $1050 with a a 6 core Ryzen 5600H - which I think is Zen 2, not Zen 3, but it doesn't make a huge difference, RTX 3060 graphics, a 15" 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 512GB of NVMe storage, and the Four Essential Keys in the standard desktop layout.
16GB of RAM is only another $50, and the nice 2560x1440 display option is $160. If you want to step up to an 8 core 5800H and an RTX 3070, that adds $340. So it adds up if you want all the factory options.
Shipping date, though, is July.
- A man, a plan, a YouTube channel: Louis Rossman. (Columbia News Service)
Anyone who thinks I'm tough on Apple should watch Rossman's videos where he repairs the blighted things.
- There are close to half a million open jobs in computer and network security in the US. (CBS)
Why?
Because the job sucks. It's like being a sewer maintenance worker only the rats shoot back.
- Is this dirt cheap no-name USB-C to 2.5GbE adaptor on Amazon any good? (Serve the Home)
Actually.... Yeah. It is. Surprise!
Louis Rossman MacBook Logic Board Repair Warranty Job Video of the Day
Before Hololive I watched every single one of these. Well, more I played them on the third monitor while I worked to help mute the screams of the damned from next door. (I work from home and my neighbours have small children. About thirty of them it sometimes seems.)
What Poor Company Will Steve Eviscerate This Time Video of the Day
Cyberpower. This one almost didn't suck.
I mentioned in the Dell video that there was a second part that went over the rest of the problems. Here it is.
Disclaimer: Oh my God, it's full of crap. Actually, I was wondering if Dell bloatware was to blame for recent poor performance of my own desktop system. Turns out that no, it was Windows automagically migrating my swap file from the NVMe SSD to the 5400 RPM hard drive. Thanks, Windows. That sucked.
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Sunday, May 23
Daily News Stuff 23 May 2021
And Your Little God Too Edition
Anime of the day is Oh My Goddess - or Ah! My Goddess, originally, before someone pointed out the natural pun - a five-episode OVA series from 1993, animated by AIC. It's short and sweet and colourful and lovingly animated and generally a whole lot of fun.
Highly recommended.
That's not the only version, though. There's also a series of 48 short comedy episodes from 1998 called Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses which is also fun; it's a kids' cartoon version of the main story but a well-crafted kids' cartoon version.
And there's a movie from 2000 which I recall liking quite a bit, though it's quite a jump from the OVA to the story told in that movie.
There's also a 26 episode TV series from 2005 that I wasn't crazy about - I'll get to why in a moment - and a 24-episode sequel series from 2006, which I don't recall watching, and a two-episode OVA from from 2007 and a three-episode OVA from 2011, all adapted from a 48-volume original manga series that ran from 1988 to 2014 and, apparently, just when it had finally reached a conclusion - I gave up on that about fifteen years ago - started up again in 2019 with another three volumes out so far.
The manga has sold over 25 million copies, half to fans, and the other half, so far as I can tell, to masochists.
I like the original OVA series because it picks five self-contained stories from the manga (including the origin stories of the four main characters), tells those, and is done.
I don't like the TV version because it is faithful to the manga, retelling the complete story, chapter by chapter, and the manga is just painfully slow moving.
This one was originally created with two VHS decks and a stopwatch. When you notice that the lip-sync isn't perfect, it's actually a miracle that it lines up at all given the technology available.
This version is a frame-exact remake from the DVD release, but I think the original is still floating around somewhere.
Disclaimer: Gott weiß ich will kein Engel sein.
And Your Little God Too Edition
Top Stories
- Several more sources are reporting on the new dual-actuator drive from Seagate. None of them mention the price.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that it costs more than just buying two drives and putting them in RAID-1.
- You own nothing. (Motherboard)
An airbag vest for motorcyclists sounds like a potentially neat idea. This one, though, silently after some warnings - probably - stops working if your monthly payment doesn't go through, which sounds to me like a great way for the manufacturer to get sued out of existence.
Someone arrange the lawyers, I'll bring popcorn.
Highly recommended.
That's not the only version, though. There's also a series of 48 short comedy episodes from 1998 called Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses which is also fun; it's a kids' cartoon version of the main story but a well-crafted kids' cartoon version.
And there's a movie from 2000 which I recall liking quite a bit, though it's quite a jump from the OVA to the story told in that movie.
There's also a 26 episode TV series from 2005 that I wasn't crazy about - I'll get to why in a moment - and a 24-episode sequel series from 2006, which I don't recall watching, and a two-episode OVA from from 2007 and a three-episode OVA from 2011, all adapted from a 48-volume original manga series that ran from 1988 to 2014 and, apparently, just when it had finally reached a conclusion - I gave up on that about fifteen years ago - started up again in 2019 with another three volumes out so far.
The manga has sold over 25 million copies, half to fans, and the other half, so far as I can tell, to masochists.
I like the original OVA series because it picks five self-contained stories from the manga (including the origin stories of the four main characters), tells those, and is done.
I don't like the TV version because it is faithful to the manga, retelling the complete story, chapter by chapter, and the manga is just painfully slow moving.
Tech News
- AMD's socket AM5 is on its way with 1718 pins. (WCCFTech)
That's about 400 more pins than AM4 but it doesn't sound like it will bring major functional changes. It will support DDR5 RAM, which requires more pins per module than DDR5 - each module provides two 32-bit channels each with independent addressing and ECC, instead of a single 64-bit channel. This adds about 40 signals per module but provides much better support for multi-threaded workloads.
Zen 4 won't be out until next year, so the first parts to use socket AM5 will the upcoming Rembrandt APU with Zen 3 cores and RDNA2 graphics.
(Similarly, the first parts on socket AM4 weren't Zen 1, but an APU built on an older Bulldozer family core. This allowed manufacturers to qualify their boards ready for the arrival of Ryzen.)
- How to disable Windows 10's crappy new newsfeed. (Bleeping Computer)
Alternately, install Start10 from Stardock.
- The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano is a 13" thin-and-light laptop with the Four Essential Keys. (Thurrott.com)
The location of the keys is slightly awkward, but they are present, and in a laptop less than twelve inches wide and weighing under two pounds there's just not a whole lot of room for perfect keyboard layouts.
It comes with an 11th gen Intel CPU, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage, a 2160x1350 screen (a 16:10 ratio), two Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.
So I/O is rather on the light side. It does however have a fingerprint scanner and a physical shutter for the webcam, so when you turn it off, it is off.
- The Indian government has asked that social media companies remove references to "Bombay Bat Soup Death Plague", which is the term that took hold after they previously requested the same firms to remove references to the "Indian variant" of COVID-19. (Reuters)
Slow learners.
The Only Good Thing to Come Out of Evangelion Anime Music Video of the Day
This one was originally created with two VHS decks and a stopwatch. When you notice that the lip-sync isn't perfect, it's actually a miracle that it lines up at all given the technology available.
This version is a frame-exact remake from the DVD release, but I think the original is still floating around somewhere.
Disclaimer: Gott weiß ich will kein Engel sein.
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